I am looking at three articles right now. The first two both come from The Revenge of the Liar: New Essays on the Paradox, edited by JC Beall. The third is from an upcoming issue of Studia Logica. I’ll get to that. First, though, I want to talk about “Embracing Revenge: On the Indefinite Extendability of Language” by Roy T. Cook.

All three of these articles about the Liar and the Revenge problems. In case anyone is unclear, the Liar is a famous paradox in semantics. You’ve probably heard it before: “This sentence is false.” If it’s true, then it’s false. But if it’s false, then it’s true. So it’s a contradiction however you look at it; a paradox. The Revenge is a response to an attempt to solve this paradox. Revenge, as Cook writes it, works like this: “Given any account that purports to deal adequately with a particular paradox, that account will rely on concepts… which, if allowed into the object language, generate new paradoxes that cannot be dissolved by the account in question” (33). So basically, whatever you do to solve the Liar, there is another, stronger Liar that your solution can’t defeat.

This would be pretty frustrating for most people. The idea that every attempt to solve it just pushes it one step further leads most people to throw up their hands in frustration and look for another solution. But Cook suggests that this is the wrong way to go. In fact, he even goes so far as to say that “The Revenge Problem, it turns out, is not a problem at all, but instead affords the crucial insight that allows for a truly satisfactory solution to the semantic paradoxes” (34). In order to feel satisfied by these solutions, all we have to do is accept that “we can never speak a ‘universal language’, quantify over all sentences, or speak of all truth values at once” (35).

This is a concept I can get behind. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the idea of talking about everything. As soon as you try to get outside of everything in order to talk about it, there is something else. It’s like the idea of going beyond the universe. By definition, the universe is everything; there is no outside. If you were outside, you wouldn’t be outside, because you’d still be in the universe. So you can’t ever look at the universe from the outside. Similarly, you can’t talk about everything from the outside, because the terms you use to talk about everything would be something not included in that set of everything.

It’s like set theory; there are an infinite number of sets, because if you think of the set containing all sets, it can’t contain itself, so there is at least one set that is not included in that set (namely, itself). Anyway, the point is, I’m willing to go along for the ride with Cook.

Cook’s next step is to talk about the concept of truth values, of falsity, and of truth in and of itself. This, I think, is going a bit too basic, so for now, I’m just going to skip this stuff (he does a better job of it in his other article anyway). The point is that “more expressively powerful languages (in particular, those that contain more semantic vocabulary) require more truth-values” and that “The concept of truth-value is indefinitely extensible” (38). This makes sense. If you can’t speak of all truth values at once, then truth-values must be universally extensible; there’s always at least one more that you can’t speak of. As for more expressive languages needing more truth values, this seems pretty obvious. When all you can say is that something is either true or false, you lose any chance of going half way. Someone is either bald or hairy. They can’t have a receding hairline or be balding. But when you add a halfway value, then you’ll want values to cut that half in half again. Cook says this gives us a potential Sorites paradox (though he doesn’t see that as a problem), but I think it’s more like a Zeno paradox. Like Achilles and the Tortoise. In order to get somewhere, you first have to cross the halfway point. But to do that, you first have to cross the halfway point to that halfway point. Etc, ad infinitum.

Anyway. Cook at this point goes through the formal theory, which is complex enough that I need a bit of refreshing in modal logic to really follow all that well. But eventually, he goes back to text and makes an interesting point: “Given a language L, if we can completely describe the semantics of L, then we have (knowingly or not) extended our language to a new language L’” which means, for those who prefer computer metaphors, “the Revenge Problem is no longer a bug—it is now a feature, exemplifying the indefinite extensibility of the concepts language, statement, and truth-value” (45, his italics). So Revenge actually helps; the more we think about it, the better our language gets.

This seems like it might be a bit on the ridiculous side. If he’s right, then there are an infinite number of languages, and we’re constantly moving to a better one. But we have to remember that the way he’s using “language” isn’t the same as the way we use it in every day life. By the definition Cook is using, as soon as there is a single new word, we have a new language. So English before the word “Robot” was coined is a different language than English after robot. In other words, the Revenge feature just makes our language stronger, more expressive. That’s good.

I’ll now move on to Matti Eklund’s article, “The Liar Paradox, Expressibility, Possible Languages.” Eklund starts off by talking about ways out of the Revenge problem. He says that “One common way to avoid a threatening revenge problem is to deny semantic self-sufficiency” (57); that is to say, if you are willing to say that there aren’t ways to describe a language within the language, then you’re okay. This would also mean that “This sentence is not true.” Wouldn’t make sense, because it can’t refer to itself this way.

Eklund does give a nice approach to that problem of the word “language” I was just talking about. He says that “In logic, languages are individuated very finely: add another constant and you have a new language. Outside logic, however, natural languages are individuated more liberally: a language can undergo significant changes in its vocabulary and its syntax and still we happily speak of it as the same language after these changes” (60). As any linguist would say, languages are living things, evolving all the time. Want an example? Some people are predicting that “they” will become a singular neuter predicate. So if you don’t know someone’s gender, you can say “What gender are they?” pointing at just one person. Or look at how rarely the semicolon is used; regardless, language does evolve, and it’s good that Eklund acknowledges that he’s talking about a different definition of the word.

But that’s about where my agreement with Eklund falls apart. He makes a claim that it is possible to talk about predicates and words that don’t yet exist. By saying that something ‘falls under the predicate that someone will speak at a specific date,’ he claims that we have expressed that predicate. But I can’t agree with that. It doesn’t follow. Words that did not exist in, say, the nineteenth century English could not be expressed. If they could, it wouldn’t be a language in which those words don’t exist. In other words, if you can express a concept, that concept exists. If you can express a word, that word exists. What Eklund is doing here, I think, is equating “refer to” with “expresses.” I can, after all, refer to predicate that the world’s shortest man will speak on January 21, 2112. But I haven’t expressed that predicate; I still have no idea what would or would not fall under that predicate, I can’t use it. It doesn’t exist. But I can refer to things that don’t exist. Any atheist is able to refer to god, even though she doesn’t believe that god exists. But god cannot be expressed without being able to examine all properties. (As a side note, I think this is the same problem Descartes and others made; just because you can refer to god and all his qualities, including existence, does not mean that god exists. You didn’t express god, you just referred to him.)

He makes a fairly convoluted argument about negation, then suggests four possibilities for determining which of two types of negation (Boolean and Priest) is correct: (a)one of them is right, one wrong; (b)it can’t be determined; (c)both exist, they’re just expressed in different languages; (d)the underlying metaphysical assumptions might be wrong (66). Then he says that “Alternatives (a)-(d) appear to be exhaustive. But they all seem objectionable. This is a paradox” (69). This I cannot agree with.

First off, even if the list appears to be exhaustive, if none of them are correct, then the list by definition is NOT exhaustive. As Sherlock Holmes said, “Eliminate the impossible. Whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth.” In other words, if you’re looking for a solution, and none of your attempts to solve the problem work, you haven’t found the solution yet. This does not imply that there IS no solution, only that you haven’t found it yet.

Secondly, he used a word that a philosophy professor once told me never to use: seem. This professor told me that “’seem’ is what someone says when they can’t prove something. If they say ‘it seems’ what they mean is ‘I can’t prove’.” Anecdote aside, I still don’t follow his reasoning. Even if (a)-(d) seem to be objectionable, it doesn’t mean that they are. It just means that they appear to be. That they seem objectionable. A man driving an expensive car and wearing an Armani suit might seem to be wealthy. But that doesn’t mean he is; he could be a thief.

Finally, this isn’t a paradox. A paradox is when something contradicts itself, but still seems (there it is) to be true. Saying that a list MIGHT be exhaustive and that the items on the list MAY all be false isn’t a paradox; if anything, it’s unfortunate or the solution is just unintuitive. If a list was inclusive, and all the members of the list were false, it still wouldn’t be a paradox. All it would be is proof that there was not a solution to the problem. In order to even reach towards paradox, we’d have to first assume that (1) there IS a solution and (2) the solution MUST come from the list. Even then, I’m not sure it would qualify.

Okay, let me go back to Roy Cook. His second article, “What is a Truth Value And How Many Are There?” is more or less the same idea as his other article, but explained less in formal terms and more in plain language.

Cook gives a nice explanation of how truth values work. He says “a statement receives a particular truth value because of a particular relationship which holds between the state of affairs/situation/structure/etc. described by or appropriately associated with the statement (i.e. what the statement says) and the structure of the world (i.e. what is the case)” (185). So something is true if and only if what it says matches up with the world, and false if and only if it does not. Makes sense to me.

He then goes on to explain the idea of vagueness requiring more truth values, and how more than two truth values immediately shows that truth is not based on whether something matches up with the world or doesn’t; in other words, it shows that there’s more than just the two states. It has to (188).

He also says that “the Liar sentence forces us to give up classical semantics” (189); it forces us to use more than the two values of true and false.

Then Cook moves through his earlier argument about making more and more languages. He writes that “Any language that we speak can be extended by adding the resources for describing semantics of that language, and in addition, the semantics for a particular language will always involve resources beyond those that can be described in that very language. As a result, we are (often unknowingly) extending our language all the time by the very act of attempting to describe the semantics for that language” (193-4). I think this makes intuitive sense, if we’re willing to follow along with Cook’s idea that you can’t talk about everything in a language without making a bigger language. And I am willing to follow.

What follows from this is that “We can never reach a point…where we have all of the truth values, or where extensions to our language are no longer required in order to describe things that we might wish to describe (such as the semantics of a particular language),” which means that “there is an infinite hierarchy of truth values” (199). But that’s not a bad thing. Because of this, in fact, we know that we can say very nearly everything we think we can say, and can very nearly talk about any language, so long as we know that sooner or later, we’ll run out of time to get higher up in the hierarchy.

As a side note, Roy Cook showed me a particularly cool thing the other day. He called it the Super Duper Liar. It basically looks like this: “This sentence has a truth value (i.e., one of all of them) other than true.”

He also referred to this as his version of the Revenge problem. I like that, mostly because “Roy’s Revenge” has a nice sound to it; though on reflection it should probably be the name of a band, not a philosophical argument.

]]> http://cogitas.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/on-paradox-liars-and-revenge/feed/ 0 cogitas http://cogitas.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/on-truth-and-self-reference-a-return-to-the-realms-of-philosophy/ http://cogitas.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/on-truth-and-self-reference-a-return-to-the-realms-of-philosophy/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:17:41 +0000 cogitas http://cogitas.wordpress.com/?p=169 ]]>

I started a philosophy class, and immediately got sick, so I missed the second class. However, in a very interesting attendance policy, I was required to write a paper about the readings we discussed the day I was absent. As I was writing it, I figured it would help to post it here. So here are my thoughts on paradox and self reference:

In order to truly understand the nature of paradoxes, it is first imperative to understand both the concept of truth and of self reference. For truth, we turn to Michael Glanzberg’s entry on the subject in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and for self reference we turn to Thomas Bolander’s entry on the subject in the same publication.

Glanzberg discusses truth first by going through some of the theories of truth. Where we might think that there is only one Truth (with a capital C), it turns out that how we define something as true has an inherent and very important decision about the world. For example, the correspondence theory, which Glanzberg attributes to GE Moore and Bertrand Russel, states that “a true propositions is identical to fact,”¹ which contains in it the assumption that the language which forms propositions is connected to the ‘real world’ in a significant way. That is, there is access to reality through language, and that the signs in language actually do signify reality. Moore and Russel prefer a phrase like “A belief is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact,”² as this more accurately represents the world view. It is also interesting to note that Plato said that knowledge consisted of Justified True Belief³; this phrase and the whole correspondence theory of truth resonate in in this idea.

There is also the neo-classical view of truth, which states that “a belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity—a fact—to which it corresponds. If there is no such entity, the belief is false.”⁴ This brings with it an interesting epistemic view: that there must be existence, there must be reality that exists outside of language. This is an important presupposition.

Glanzberg goes on to gain make reference to Plato’s Justified True Belief when discussing Coherence Theory, giving it the slogan “A belief is true if and only if it is part of a coherent system of beliefs.”⁵ Coherence theory demands that truth be part of a whole, that there is only one Truth, though there may be other truths that the Truth is made up of. Thus, in order for something to be true, it needs to be coherent with the rest of the Truth. Coherence, then, would be a stronger requirement than Consistency. That is, it’s not enough that something be consistent (ie, non-contradictory) with the structure of the truth as a whole. It must also be coherent.

Next the article moves on to discuss sentences as truth bearers. These sentences being what Quine (1960) called ‘Eternal Sentences’⁶; that is, their meaning is not context-dependent.⁷ These sentences are part of a fixed language whose sentences are fully interpreted. This leads us to Convention T, which states “An adequate theory of truth for L must imply, for each sentence Φ of L “Φ” is true if and only if Φ.”⁸ So if every sentence in L has a truth value (as it should if L is fully interpreted), then “Convention T guarantees that the truth predicate given by the theory will

be extensionally correct, i.e., have as its extension all and only the true sentences of L.”⁹

Moving on through the article, we eventually come to Glanzberg’s discussion of revisiting correspondence in light of facts and truth makers (A truth maker being something in the world that makes the sentence true.¹⁰). Facts he says, make good truth makers. He also makes the controversial claim that “Negative facts would be the truthmakers for negated sentences.”¹¹ We say this is controversial because Glanzberg mentions that Russel is ambivalent about them, while Beall and Armstrong defend or reject them, respectively.

The remainder of the article covers realism, anti-realism, deflationism, and and the redundancy theory, which asserts “there is no property of truth at all, and appearances of the expression ‘true’ in our sentences are redundant, having no effect on what we express,”¹² before finally moving on to the last thing we’ll talk about here: Truth and Language.

Theories of truth are theories of reality. Sentences to which Tarski’s theory applies “characterize the world as being some way or another, and this in turn determines whether they are true or false”¹³; in fact, “any theory of truth that falls into the broad category of those which are theories of truth conditions can be seen as part of a theory of meaning.”¹⁴ This is significant; as we have seen before, any theory of truth (that is a theory of truth conditions) is a theory of meaning: thus, any of these theories make epistemological claims about what is and what we can know.

What, though, is the point? To answer that question, we move on to Thomas Bolander’s article on Self Reference. Bolander starts his article by defining self reference. He says that it “is used to denote a statement that refers to itself or its own referent.”¹⁵ The most famous of these, of course, is the liar’s paradox (“This sentence is not true”). Self reference seems to be the source of many of the most difficult semantic paradoxes.

Bolander goes through these paradoxes in rapid fire, hitting Grelling’s paradox about whether or not “heterological” is heterological, where heterological is defined as “does not itself have the property it expresses,”¹⁶ then moving on to Set-Theoretic paradoxes like Cantor’s paradox and the Hypergame paradox¹⁷, before moving on to Epistemic paradoxes like the paradox of the knower¹⁸. Thankfully, after this he settles down to discuss the structure of paradoxes, setting up the idea that “even if paradoxes seem different by involving different subject matters, they might be almost identical in their underlying structure.”¹⁹ This is a helpful idea: if all these paradoxes do have identical, or even similar, underlying structures, then the same methods to solve one should help to solve all of them. Bolander goes on to show how all, or at least most, paradoxes of self-reference follow the same structure. Priest (1994), then presents the principle of uniform solution: “same kind of paradox, same kind of solution.”²⁰

Bolander discusses why paradoxes matter, saying that “The significance of a paradox is its indication of a flaw or deficiency in our understanding of the central concepts involved in it.”²¹ So if we are to quest for knowledge, in particular for certain knowledge, then we must deal with these paradoxes. And there are several methods to try.

Bolander suggests two main methods: formalizing knowledge as a predicate in a first-order logic (syntactic treatment of knowledge) or formalizing knowledge as an operator in modal logic (semantic treatment of knowledge).²² The problem with these two is that it leads to problems of inconsistency, like Tarski’s theorum or Godel’s incompleteness theorum. Attempts to solve paradoxes of self references show one important thing: “there are limits to what can be proven and what can be computed,”²³ which does not bode well for the idea of certain knowledge. Thankfully, Bolander moves on to a section about how to solve, or at least get around, these paradoxes.

The main point of the remainder of the entry is the idea of hierarchies. Of type theory. As Bolander writes, “The fundamental idea of type theory is to introduce the constraint that any set of a given type may only contain elements of lower types (that is, may only contain sets which are located lower in the stratification). This effectively blocks Russel’s paradox, since no set can then be a member of itself.” This also blocks the liar paradox, because “now a sentence can only express the truth or untruth of sentences at lower levels, an thus a sentence such as the liar that expresses its own untruth cannot be founded.”²⁴

While this does move around the paradoxes, and therefor opens the door for us to still know things, it seems to me like a bit of a dodge of the issue. Bolander himself admits that it is a way around, rather than through, the paradoxes. Maybe there isn’t a solution; if there were, it probably would have been found already. If that is true, then we have to be satisfied with avoiding these paradoxes if we expect to know anything for certain. It may be, then, that the nature of a paradox is that it shows us where we need to make moves and add rules to ensure that we don’t run into them. That the paradoxes themselves are interesting intellectual exercises, but in and of themselves are not particularly valuable, at least in so far as favoring the development of a corpus of knowledge.

This semester, I am taking a course about Habermas and the public sphere. As part of that, I’m reading Dewey’s book. So far (about 2/3 of the way through it). It’s an interesting book, some very cool ideas about what the public is, what the state is, and how/whether democracy works.

There are a couple of lines that struck me as important but were not part of the larger argument. For example, Dewey says that “ideas belong to human beings who have bodies” (8), which includes an interesting assertion about identity (linking it with the body), as does the later comment that “It is the essence of ordinary thought to grasp the external scene and hold it as reality” (101), which has an important assertion about epistemology and reality; Dewey seems to hold what philosophers refer to as the “correspondence theory of truth,” where something is true only if it corresponds to reality.

Dewey also says that “Progress is not steady and continuous. Retrogression is as periodic as advance” (30), an important and interesting statement. I think we often forget that progress isn’t always forward. Sometimes, errors are made, experiments fail. What matter is that we keep experimenting.

But on the whole, what Dewey is discussing is the idea of the public and of the state. The state, he says, “instead of being all absorbing and inclusive, is under some circumstances the most idle and empty of social arrangements” (28). This at first seems wrong, but after a bit of consideration seems not only right, but obvious. The state is created by those in it, and adjusted by those same people. This is why “In no two ages or places is there the same public” (33); there are different individuals involved in the public, and hence different individuals involved in the state.

The state and the public are pretty inextricably linked. The public forms the state, and as Dewey points out, “the public has no hands except those of individual human beings” (82), so the state has no hands except those of individuals. Which, according to Dewey, is how we get to the basic problem: “What arrangement will prevent rulers from advancing their own interests at the expense of the rules? Or, in positive terms, by what political means shall the interest of governors be identified with those of the governed?” (93). An important question. How can we have rulers that don’t put their own interests first, and instead put the interest of the ruled at the forefront? I’m not sure there is an answer to this.

At the end of chapter 3, Dewey says that “The same forces which have brought about the forms of democratic government, general suffrage, executives and legislators chosen by majority vote, have also brought about conditions which halt the social and humane ideals that demand the utilization of government as the genuine instrumentality of an inclusive and fraternally associate public” (109). I was asked what I thought of this particular quote. Here is my response:

While Dewey is talking here about the forces behind government as a whole, it seems to me like the individual people involved are the significant factors, and might explain how it is that these forces that bring about good things also bring about negative conditions. As Dewey says, every member of government has a “dual capacity” (76) as both government agent and individual. While government wants the ideals of suffrage, majority voting, etc, the individual people in that government still want what is best for them personally. As “all deliberate choices and plans are finally the result of single human beings” (21), and “the public has no hands except those of individual human beings” (82), we see personal desires and interests interfering with the ideals of the government (or public) as a whole. So while the society may be in favor of general suffrage, those elected officials may also be trying to stop the very same thing. Thus, the same forces that bring about the forms also bring about conditions which halt the social and humane ideals, because those forces are in the end the actions of the individual human beings involved, and they are always on some level looking for what is most beneficial to them first.

And I still think that. But I also think that Dewey is suggesting that democracy is a matter of experimentation: we try something, and either it works and we continue, or it doesn’t and we abandon it. We need to worry about the tendency to put the good of the public aside in favor of the good of industry.

In chapter 4, Dewey begins getting into the problems with democracy, that parties becomes more important than people. As Dewey says, “Political parties may rule, but they don’t govern” (121). People vote for parties rather than issues (135), and as a result, the public begins to lose authority.

It’s not that the public is destroyed or reduced in any way. As Dewey says, “It is not that there is no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the consequences of social transactions. There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition” (137). So maybe the public is too big to really be powerful, too many groups with their own agendas to be able to do anything to help them all.

The problem is that the groups don’t communicate. As Dewey closes the chapter he writes “Communication can alone create a great community. Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible” (142). It’s a very dark view of democracy, and not a particularly encouraging one. Hopefully, the rest of the book will swing back upwards.

I just finished reading Corbett’s article, published in  Style in Rhetoric and Composition (a critical sourcebook) edited by Paul Butler. The article seems to be mostly about why students are unable to analyze style, along with a few suggestions of ways to do it.

What’s interesting is that Corbett seems to believe that the reason students are unable to analyze style is as simple as just not realizing that they can do it. That students don’t quite understand what style is, seeing it “represented as a curious blend of the idiosyncratic and the conventional” (210). He seems to think that students don’t understand style mostly because teachers don’t know how to teach it.

One of the problems, of course, is grammar. Corbett says that “If style represents the choices on makes from the available grammatical options, then students must have at least a basic awareness of what the grammatical options are if they are to profit from stylistic studies” (211). So students have to know grammar in order to understand that using different grammatical structures. But, Corbett suggests, students can learn grammar WHILE learning style, rather than before.

Corbett also talks about analyzing versus improving style, suggesting that the two need not be mutually exclusive, and that in fact doing one will help with the other (211).

As for how to actually study style, Corbett suggests looking at the objectively observable: “length of sentences (in number of words); grammtical types of sentences (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex); rhetorical types of sentences (loose, periodic, balanced, antithetical); functional types of sentences (statement, question, command, exclamation); types and frequency of sentence-openers; methods and location of expansions in sentences; amount of embedding” (212). He also suggests that we need only a corpus of around 1000-1500 words, though the larger the sample, the better (213).

This objective study has the value of showing students specific things that are being done, drawing their attention to how certain effects are achieved. There’s definitely value in that. But I think this is a very limited type of study. More on that in a bit.

Corbett talks about figures of speech, something I was wondering about when he talked about grammar. He defines a figure of speech as “any artful deviation from the ordinary way of speaking or writing” (214), which I think sometimes includes intentional grammatical errors. I also believe that some figures of speech would defy the objective analysis Corbet outlines.

I think that Corbett is taking too simplistic a view of studying, and thereby teaching, style. The problem, though, is what to do instead. As Corbett states, “improving our students’ synthetical skills should be our main concern as teachers of composition” (216), and he’s right: we should be concerned with making our students better and more effective writers. With teaching them to make better stylistic choices.

But I think this objective analysis is too simple. It will let a student see the way Hemingway structures his sentences, and may, as Corbett suggests, lead to analysis and consideration of why he made such choices. Corbett does say that “the gathering of data is a necessary stage but should not be the stopping point” (213). The problem is that I don’t see much of where to go from there. Yes, Corbett does suggest that students ask why certain things occur. But I’m not sure that’s enough.

The problem, from my point of view, is that I am able to say that I don’t think Corbett is going deep enough, but at the same time, can’t really say what would be deep enough. I’m not sure where to go from here. I can agree with Corbett’s suggestion of having students imitate styles and attempt to reproduce or alter the style in a given sample of writing (217), but I think there is more.

A student needs to be able to identify the style of an author, not just in an objective sense, but also in the subjective sense that Corbett derides early on in the article (and rightly so). A student does not know what ‘lilting style’ is, Corbett suggests (209), and so cannot know how to change that or how to identify it. But that’s what they should be learning. They should know what makes a style lilting, when lilting is a good thing, and how to change the style. Corbett’s suggestions are the first step to this, but there has to be more.

Of course, there was only so much room in the article, and Corbett himself agrees that more needs to be done. I just found myself dissatisfied with stopping where he did. But maybe that’s good. Maybe that dissatisfaction will help drive me to think on how to teach these things that I believe need to be taught.

I remember when I was a little kid. People used to ask me the same question they ask every kid. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I used to tell them the same thing (Writer or teacher), but as time went on, the question became more serious. No more smiles when the question asked, no more glazed look in the eyes while listening to my answer. No more promise that I’ll be able to do whatever I want. If I said “Writer,” I’d get “You better have something to fall back on.” And when I said “Teacher” I’d get a follow up question about what I’d want to teach.

I got older still, and now the people asking me were either teachers themselves, or guidance counselors and advisers of some kind. I had to pick a major, after all. Then graduation was coming, and I had to figure out what I was doing after graduation. Then graduate school started, and I needed a topic for my Master’s thesis.

It’s a question that keeps on asking. It keeps coming up. What do I want to be when I grow up?

Recently, it’s started asking itself again.This time, the question is about what I want to do after my PhD. The answer to that question will help me decide what to write my dissertation on. So where do I want to be? What do I want to do when I grow up?

I don’t know much about the way the academic world really works, but my understanding of it tells me that there are a couple of different levels of school. There are small liberal arts colleges, where teaching is important, publishing really isn’t, and there are fewer than five thousand total students. Classes are smaller, no graduate students.

Then there’s regular liberal arts colleges. Maybe there are a few master’s programs. Mostly, though, it’s just a slightly bigger version of the small liberal arts.

We have community colleges, which are only two year schools. Small classes, small student body, more of a job you go to than anything else. Not sure if they care about research.

Then we have state schools, at levels of R1, R2, and R3. R3 is at the bottom, where research is good, maybe required for tenure, but the focus is still primarily on teaching and service. R2 is more research focused, usually larger. MA programs for sure, probably some PhD, with a student body in the 10-25,000 range, I would guess.

Then there’s R1. The top state schools in the country. These are the “University of…” schools. (Like U of Illinois, U of Minnesota, UPenn, etc). They care more about research than about teaching. Student bodies in the 30-60,000 range. Lots of graduate students. These are the prestige schools, the ‘publish or perish’ types. Where tenure is only slightly weaker than the gravity in a black hole. Higher pressure, yes. But more power, I suppose.

There’s also the Ivy League, which I think is a combination of R1 and Liberal Arts. I don’t know; I honestly doubt I’ll be able to end up there even if I want to.

Which is the question: where do I want to end up? Because that’s important for a dissertation. If I want a job at a research school, I want a dissertation that demonstrates that I have interesting and new ideas, that I know research, and that I can do it well. The same dissertation will convince a liberal arts college that they can’t keep me.

I used to think I wanted to work in a liberal arts college. Like the one I went to. It was a great school, with fantastic teachers. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Talking to a friend of mine who just went back to school and is dealing with the fact that other schools aren’t as good as the one we went to, and the onus of learning is stronger than the onus of teaching; it’s up to him. Between those conversations and chats with my wonderful wife, I’ve come to a conclusion: I don’t want to work in a liberal arts college.

That’s not entirely true. I don’t want to start there. I wouldn’t mind ending up there some day. But I don’t think it’s the job I want fresh out of my degree. The problem I’ve always had when thinking about working at a small liberal arts college is that I LIKE giving advice. I want to work with graduate students. And to work with grad students at all, I have to go somewhere else. To work with them a lot, I probably need an R1.

A lot of the professors at my school used to work at an R1 (a surprising number of them at NYU), then came to my school so they could focus on teaching. I guess it was a form of retirement; work for a while at an R1, build up a reputation and list of publications, then go to another school where they appreciate your teaching.

Not to say that R1s don’t appreciate teaching. But research is more important.

For me, I’ll teach as well as I can no matter where I am. But if I go to an R1, I’ll have more options as my life goes on. Maybe I’ll stay there, get tenure, and then do as I damned well please. Or maybe I’ll leave after a few years or a decade or so. I don’t know. That’s not an answer I’m ready with.

I’ll save that for the next time the question asks itself.

For now, I want R1. That means a dissertation that follows that pattern.

Primarily, I am here today to write about Cicero, about the first 100 pages of De Oratore. But thinking about Cicero makes me think about my own past. About the void, the separation, between rhetoric and philosophy. Now, I do rhetoric. In college and my first Master’s degree, I did philosophy. So I straddle the void.

Cicero wanted to bring this gap closed; it’s one of the reasons I like him. He wrote passages like “those who were styled rhetoricians and taught rules of speaking had no clear understanding of anything, and that no one could acquire skill in speaking unless he had first learned about the ideas of philosophy” (84). So the best orators are also philosophers. This means the best rhetoricians are philosophers (since oratory and rhetoric in ancient texts seems almost interchangeable).

But there is a difference between writing and speaking, as Cicero reminds me. They are connected, but not the same thing. Cicero says that “What is most fundamental, however, is [. . .] writing as much as possible. It is the pen, the pen, that is the best and most eminent teacher and creator of speaking” (150). Cicero believes that “whoever comes to oratory after much practice in writing brings this ability along: even when he is improvising, what he says will still turn out to resemble a written text” (152). I can certainly agree with this. Writing helps speaking, speaking helps writing, and reading helps everything.

The importance of reading is pretty clear in Cicero. He says that “we must read poetry, acquire a knowledge of history, and select teachers and writers of all the noble arts, read them attentively, and, for the sake of practice, praise, expound, correct, criticize, and refute them. We must argue every question on both sides, and on every topic we must elicit as well as express every plausible argument” (158, my emphasis). Has there been no other point in this book, this is where Cicero would win me over.  By saying that every good orator (and hence every good rhetorician) needs to be able to argue both sides is a critical point to me. When I teach argument, it’s the main point I try to get across. When I was in philosophy, it was how I made the strongest arguments.

Skipping out on the other side is not a strategy to strengthen your own argument. By ignoring the opposition, you leave them open to offer even their weakest argument as something that you did not (and hence could not) refute. But by suggesting the opponent’s arguments, by making “the case you are pleading, whatever it is, [. . .] seem stronger, [. . .] your speech will have the most power to persuade” (44), and by presenting the other case with more persuasive power, and then refuting it, you garner yourself even greater persuasive power.

It’s like the way Cicero suggests a speaker work. First, he says, you must win over the audience. Then you present the case, then the point of contention. You make your claims, refute your opponent’s, and finally make your side look the best and their side the worse (143). The first part is purely a matter of delivery. If you deliver well, you will make people like you. Then you can start actually arguing.

And how do we make people like us? Cicero says that “it is essential to possess a certin esprit and humor, the culture that befits a gentleman, and an ability to be quick and concise in rebuttal as well as attack, combined with refinement, grace, and urbanity” and we must pay attention to “the movement of the body, by gesture, by facial expression, and by inflecting and varying the voice” (17-18).

Cicero is talking about the ideal orator, who has read everything of relevance (18), and who is possessd of a great natural talent (113). In fact, “a certain quickness of the mind and intellect is required, which displays itself in the keenness of its thoughts, in the richness with which it unfolds and elaborates them, and in the strength and retentiveness of its memory” (113-114). So a quick wit, a strong memory, and a keen mind. All required for the ideal orator.

But that’s not all. The ideal orator has to be “a little less than shameless” (119), and “we have to demand the acumen of a dialectician, the thoughts of the philosopher, the words, I’d almost say, of a poet, the memory of a jurisconsult, the voice of a tragic performer, and gestures close to those of a consummate actor” (128). It’s a hefty list of requirements.

Of course, Cicero says that there is no such thing as the perfect (ideal) orator. We must instead satisfy ourselves with finding those closest to the ideal in as many ways as possible. But I would like to point out that here, again, we see the combination of rhetoric and philosophy. Cicero wants to bring them together, and I can’t say I blame him.

The next two articles I’ve looked at for the summer of exam reading (part one) are Carolyn Miller’s A Humanistic Rational for Technical Writing and Steven B. Katz The Ethics of Expediency. Both of these I have read about, and even blogged about before. But that was then, and this is now. So let’s start with Humanism and move to the Holocaust. All page number references are from Central Works in Technical Communication.

When I went to reread this article, I found that the things interesting to me the first time were also interesting to me the second, but for different reasons. When Miller says “Technical and scientific rhetoric becomes the skill of subduing language so that it most accurately and directly transmits reality” (48), I initially thought that was important, but obvious. Now I’m not so sure. The purpose of rhetoric seems to be one of moving. Moving other people down a path of reasoning or of action. So now I disagree. Technical and scientific rhetoric is not a skill of subduing language. It’s a skill of using language to transmit the reality that the writer sees.

This could be back to my philosophy roots, but I’m starting to doubt that reality can be directly transmitted.

On page 51, Miller says that “We encourage students to see writing as a necessary evil, necessary primarily because it is an amenity occasioned by the conditions of employment in business or industry.” I don’t think she believes that it is good to encourage this view, but she has a point that many teachers of writing do present it this way. Personally, I like to present writing not as a necessary evil, but rather as a close friend that is actually far easier than the students have ever been led to believe. But that’s just my pedagogical style.

There’s also the comment “audience adaptation too often becomes an exercise in vocabulary” (51), which earlier I said made sense to me and reminded me of the students who use big words in order to ’sound smart.’ But on second glance, I don’t think that’s what Miller is saying. Different audiences have different vocabularies, individual vernaculars. There are a group of people that I can say “transhumanism” to, and they will know exactly what I mean. Groups that I could say “Obfuscate is the legacy of the Nosferatu” and receive nothing more than looks conveying that I just said something incredibly obvious. It’s not about talking down to people, nor about using words to sound smarter. Any given group has its own language. This is a discourse community thing, a matter of coins of the realm. Different disciplines will use different words, and a communicator needs to know how to communicate with other groups. Which does often amount to a vocabulary exercise.

Towards the end of the article, I find that Miller feels the same way I do about the initial representation of rhetoric. Miller does write that “Good technical writing becomes, rather than the revelation of absolute reality, a persuasive version of experience” (52), meaning that rhetoric is moving ideas and actions. And if we don’t see it that way, Miller warns that “If we pretend for a minute that technical writing is objective, we have passed off a particular political ideology as privileged truth” (52). So there is no transmission of truth. We’re not going to take a stand beside any ideology, but rather try to move people with the technical rhetoric. I like that much better.

Again, though, I don’t like Katz’s article. It’s not that I have anything against Katz or even against what he says. I just don’t like talking about or thinking about the holocaust. Thankfully, it’s not hard to look at this article without thinking about the context against which Katz set his ideas.

He writes that “All deliberative rhetoric is concerned with decision and action” (199), a pretty obvious restating of Aristotle. He goes on to tell us that “The problem in technical communication and deliberative rhetoric generally, then, is not only one of epistemology, the relationship of argument, organization, and style to thought, but also one of ethics, and how that relationship affects and reveals itself in human behavior” (199).

I think this links back to Miller very well, or at least to the idea of rhetoric being something that moves the audience. Katz is warning that deliberative rhetoric has the strongest affect on moving audiences. This makes sense, because deliberative rhetoric is dealing with the future (what we should do), whereas epideictic deals with the present (Are we doing the right thing) and forensic rhetoric with the past (what happened). So affecting what will be done should have a greater effect in the long run. So, Katz is telling us, we need to be careful and look at what we are doing in ethical terms as well as in terms of knowledge and understanding.

Katz furthers this argument when he writes that “we must always look at rhetoric in the context of historical, political, social, and economic conditions which govern the nature and use of rhetoric in culture” (206). Rhetoric is a powerful and dangerous thing, and we are responsible to consider how that power will affect things when we use it. I can agree with that. No claims of innocence if we don’t at least try to look at rhetoric in its context first. And, as Katz says, “We no longer have the luxury of considering ethics outside of the realm of rhetoric” (208). Ethics is part of rhetoric, and needs to be considered when using rhetoric.

I like that. It’s saying that rhetoric is a powerful and dangerous thing, and we need to be sure to be careful with it. It’s a weapon; and like any weapon, if we’re not careful we can hurt people with it. But used properly, it’s a tool for the greater good.

Recently, I was asked to write up a brief summary of my research interests. The question was put to me in a very interesting way. “If I told you right now,” he said, “that you had one year to write your dissertation, what would it be about?”

Great question. And I need to narrow it down a bit. The decisions I come to are not set in stone, but it’s good to have at least an idea of where I’m going.

There are a couple of options, based on my own interests as well as on what I’ve been doing since I started this program. My original interest was basically new media studies. But I’m not sure I really knew what that meant. New Media is kind of a buzz word (or phrase). I knew I was interested in technology, but I also knew that I was interested in technology that doesn’t exist (yet) but probably will. So I started with the idea of how to use technology in the classroom, developing strategies that can be applied to new technology.

My assumption was always to use the context of teaching composition for this research. It just seemed natural. But the same guy who asked me the question originally suggested that I look into teaching philosophy, since I have a background there. And he’s right, there are a lot more possibilities. With composition, I can do podcasts, lectures, and maybe peer response. But that’s about it. At the end of the day, composition is about writing, and there’s not much to do beyond writing.

But philosophy… well, that can be about a number of things. I could have the podcasts, the lectures, and the peer response. But I could also have simulations, games, thought experiments, interactive projects, chatbots, dialogues… the list goes on and on. So that’s very exciting. We’ll call this option A: Developing pedagogical strategies for teaching with new technologies, specifically focused on teaching philosophy.

But there are two other options as well. The first of the two is cultural studies.  I have a bit of a history with cultural studies. I like the way cultural identity affects things, subtly and often in invisible ways. I like to analyze cultural artifacts and see what the culture that created them holds in high esteem, what it derides, and what it strives for. I like to see the definition of achievement, or of heroism, or sacrifice, as it changes between cultures. I wrote a paper last semester about the TV show Heroes, and there’s so much more there that can be mined. I’m not sure how legitimate of a project it is (academically), but if I were to write a dissertation right now, that might be the easiest one to do. So we’ll call this option One: Investigating cultural artifacts in order to understand the unspoken rhetoric of the producing culture.

Then we have the option that covers what I’ve been researching most. Questions and Answers. I think this is very interesting, and I love working on it. I’ve done a lot with it already, and it seems very promising. I’m not even halfway through what I see as a very important and valuable project, and my interest is anything but wavering. It’s interesting, it’s academically significant. The question (no pun intended) is whether or not it’s what I want to do for the rest of my life. Which, of course, is the underlying question for any of these options. Still, this is something else I could write a dissertation on right now if I had to. So we’ll call this option Alpha: Develop a rhetorical taxonomy of questions and answers with the intention of improving how questions are asked and answered in an online environment.

So option A, option 1, and option Alpha. Not sure where I want to go, but they seem like good options. Option A seems to have the most connection to my past (thus making that past more legitimate and useful), option 1 seems to be more fun (since it would basically let me watch TV for research purposes), and option Alpha seems to be the most rich in terms of research possibilities.

Not sure where to go.

The next work on my list is Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, which is one of the major rhetorical dialogues, primarily because of its discussion of the value of writing.

When I first read this dialogue, I had no idea of the subtext. But it’s hard not to see it now. This is a dialogue about Socrates trying to seduce a young man (Phaedrus) by convincing him that he should sleep with those who care about him rather than those who don’t. Basically, that Phaedrus should sleep with Socrates.

It begins early on, when Socrates says “…show me what you are holding in your left hand under your cloak, my friend” (228d), which we would rephrase as “is that a scroll in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” It continues with constant references to going off alone or sitting (or laying) together (229b) and other shameless flirtation, on both of their parts (230d, 243e, 252b, etc).

But it’s not the flirtation that’s important. What matters is the discussion of rhetoric, and of writing in general.Socrates is against writing. The problem with writing is that it cannot be questioned; once written down, it is static and cannot be changed (275d). He doesn’t like things being written down, because “it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own” (275a). So writing will make people stop using their memories.

Well, leave aside the irony of Plato writing about why writing is bad; this seems to be the sentiment of the real Socrates (assuming there was one), and so we can forgive Plato for committing it to paper anyway. But the argument in this quote keeps making me think. We have shorter attention spans today than we did in the age of our parents and their parents. We don’t memorize as much.

But is that a growth of laziness? I don’t think so. I think it’s just a refocusing of mental effort. We have access to so much more than Socrates did. He may have been able to get his hands on one thousand books, and that’s being generous. I can find millions by typing a few things into google. Education in his day included far less information than it does today. I’ve ready probably ten thousand or more pages worth of rhetorical theory this year. Aside from the fact that this is more rhetorical theory than even existed in Socrates’s day, I find it hard to believe that he could have remembered as much about it as I do. I write things down so that I can remember where to go to look for information. This indexing allows me to remember much much more. This whole blog is an example of that. Writing helps us remember more, because we can focus on the general remembering, and leave the details committed to paper.

I’m not saying that Socrates is entirely against writing. He does say that “It’s not speaking or writing well that’s shameful; what’s really shameful is to engage in either of them shamefully or badly” (258d). So good writing is okay, and using writing for the right purpose is okay. I like to think that Socrates would approve of this blog. I’m using writing to help me remember things, not to replace my memory entirely. I am, in Socrates’s words, “storing up reminders for himself ‘when he reaches forgetful old age’ and for everyone who want sot follow in his footsteps” (276d).

Let’s move on to talking about rhetoric itself. Socrates, and therefore Plato, are certainly against the Sophist school of thought, ranking them just above tyrant and just below farmer (248e). But when speaking of rhetoric, Socrates asks a question that makes for a pretty good definition of rhetoric, at least from Plato’s view: “isn’t the rhetorical art, taken as a whole, a way of directing the soul by means of speech, not only in the lawcourts and on other public occassions but also in private?” (261b). While I have problems with universal statements, I think it’s possible to see “taken as a whole” as being a way of generalizing, rather than a universal claim. And seen this way, it’s a pretty good definition of rhetoric. It’s a way of moving people from one place to another, whether that place is physical or metaphorical.

For final thoughts, I think this dialogue is interesting in that it displays the importance of audience analysis (271d), and also has what could be considered a precurser to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover (245d-e), the Forms (247d), and even of Plato’s Cave. For the last one, Plato writes that “Although distracted by the horses, this soul does have a view of Reality, just barely” (248a). The horses themselves being representatives of the loftier parts of the soul and the baser parts, with a driver trying to reach the highest heights despite the baser horse. This in itself could be the origin of Freud’s Id, Ego, and Superego: The Id is the horse who wants baser pleasure, the Ego is the horse that is upright and good, and the Superego, straining to control both, is the charioteer. I’m not saying this is definitely where the idea came from, but it’s interesting to see that it is at least reflected here.

The next item on my reading list is Isocrates’ very long Antidosis. I’ve heard this piece described as an angry slash fiction, which makes a lot of sense to me. The peice was written as a defense for a trial that Isocrates had already lost. He was accused of being very wealthy, and that he should have to pay to build a new trireme for the Athenian navy, rather than someone else. He was never much of a public speaker, and probably far worse in his eighties (when the trial occured) than he had been earlier in his life. So he lost the case. Then he wrote this, as the defense that he should have given, that would have won the trial for him.

So there’s some bitterness there. But even still, it’s very interesting, particularly in what it shows about Isocrates and his philosophies.

Isocrates makes claims of authorship, which is interesting because others have claimed that there was no authorship until the Romantic Author. But what is most interesting at the beginning of this piece is that we see Isocrates always as a teacher, demonstrating audience awareness. He says that speakers “must not attempt to go through it all the first time but only as much as will not tire the audience” (12). Though he doesn’t follow his own advice, it’s interesting to note that he does give it. Maybe he sees this speech as being delivered over a period of time, rather than all at once.

There are two main things I want to talk about in regards to this work. The first of those is that he suggests that he be judged partially on the basis of his students. That is, if the students who learned from him are good and moral people, then clearly he has taught them to be such (104-106). This is interesting for two major reasons. First, because it is directly opposed to Gorgias, who says that it is not up to him how people use his teachings. That it isn’t the fault of the teacher if the student does evil. But aside from contradicting Gorgias, Isocrates here contradicts himself. Much later in the work, Isocrates talks about how we would not punish the teacher of boxing if his students began attacking people. Instead, we would praise the teacher for being a good teacher but condemn the student (252). This suggests that we should NOT hold the teacher responsible.

But I think that maybe this isn’t a contradiction. Maybe what Isocrates is saying is that oratory (and hence rhetoric) isn’t something that teaches people to be good, but rather that teaches them to be good speakers. So if a student of his were to speak very well about an unjust topic, or use his speaking abilities to evil ends, then we would condemn that student, but still praise Isocrates for teaching the student to speak well. He might be saying that he teaches people to be better speakers, not to be better people, and he should be judged by what he teaches, not by the actions his students take. This makes sense to me. If I teach someone to write, I want to be judged a good teacher if they write well and a bad teacher if they write poorly. I don’t want to be judged a bad teacher because they rob a bank. Maybe if they first wrote out their plan and wrote the plan badly; but again, that would be judging the writing, not the action.

The other interesting thing about Antidosis for me is that Isocrates hedges his bets as far as teaching is concerned. While sophists claim they can make anyone a great speaker, Isocrates only says that he can make people better speakers than they currently are.  He writes that “those who are going to excel in oratory, or public affairs, or any other profession must first have a natural talent for what they have chosen to do; then, they must be educated and gain knowledge of that particular subject; and third, they must practice and become familliar with its use and its implementation” (187). Just teaching alone isn’t enough.

This is interesting because it answers Plato’s objection about the naturally talented. Plato (in Gorgias) argues that the teaching of sophists can’t be good because there exists people who have not had that training who are better speakers than those who have. Isocrates would respond to this saying that clearly these people have more natural talent and more practice than the students. What matters is that the students are better than they would have been otherwise.

It seems like something obvious, but I think this is where it started. It’s hard giving it credence, it being such a prima facie truth the way it seems to be. But if we remember that Isocrates is probably one of the first to say this, and it wasn’t cliche or widely accepted at the time, it becomes far more impressive.

Overall, the work is good, but overly long. There are many interesting parts of it, but Isocrates could have followed his own advice and been a bit more concise, since “If they say the same things as their predescessors, they will appear to be shameless babblers,” though maybe we can forgive him, because he does seem to be babbling at parts, “but those who seek novel topics will have great difficulty finding something to say” (83).